The education system seems one of the only places where vastly improving technology over the past 30 years has not translated to cost savings or improved outcomes.
True, a kid who has had too much screen time is not good, just like a kid who has had too much lunch is not good. That doesn't make lunch bad, it just means the kid needs the right amount.
Screens can be helpful for kids (mine have learned a ton from Khan Academy and other online tools), but kids will have different thresholds. Some will only be able to learn a little from screens because they can't work independently. Others can learn a lot. Blanket statements like "kids lean better from humans than machines" are not helpful. They obscure the fact that there is typically one teacher for 25 kids, whereas there might be 25 screens. Even if a screen is only 1/10 as good as a teacher, it could be that learning from a screen is better than learning from a teacher (who is busy with your classmates almost all of the time).
My kid learned more math when she was doing AoPS for 2 yrs than when she was in class listening to lectures she already knew, followed by worksheets she had already mastered. Machines enable much more differentiation.
Your anecdata has a gigantic blind spot of you being a capable and engaged parent that monitors and guides your children’s screen time to be educationally productive. That time is a luxury, and your expertise is rare.
To take it back to the lunch analogy that you provided, it’s a bit like saying, “I don’t know why everyone’s kids are hungry at school, I pack a nutritious and filling lunch that I know my kids enjoy every morning.”
Logically speaking, this is incorrect. OP said that humans teach kids better than machines, full stop. To disprove this claim, I do not need to show that all kids learn better from machines, just that some do. I have shown this, and even admitted that it doesn't work for all kids.
Also, I didn't need to monitor/guide my kids so they could learn from AoPS or Khan Academy. Those platforms are self-guided. But regardless, my kid learned pretty much zero from school math, so the threshold for "better than the teacher" was very very low.
I’m going to sidestep your pedantry and focus on why we’re actually having this conversation: it is obvious from data and observations at scale that children struggle to learn meaningfully in the presence of technology, i.e. screens, in the same way that children learned with educators of the quality that taught previous generations (higher salaries).
Techno-Utopianism is such a grating ideology, especially when thrown into the ring alongside all of the other garbage that education experts have to deal with when trying to enact meaningful change in the education system.
In my country every few years a bunch of people invent some new method to teach kids how to read.
Completely ignoring that humans have been doing exactly that for at least 5000 years.
Gains in efficiency due to technology improvement, as far as I know, are always attributable to fewer people being able to do more / produce more. There are some things that will never have gains in efficiency. Technology will not reduce the number of players on a football field from 11 to 10.
My 1,500-student public California high school currently lists 7 administration-team members (principal, executive assistant, three assistant principals, school-facilities manager and food-services manager) and 11 administrative-support members (school data-processing specialist, print-center technician, senior-clerical assistant, separate registrar and attendance roles, interventions-support specialist, and others). That doesn't include 4 site maintenance, a network-support and a separate network-systems specialists; a separate media-library specialist; 2 psychologists; a college and career advisor; 4 school counselors; a wellness-space support specialist; and a social science and an athletic director.
34 administrative hires. One per 44 students. Many of those roles strike me as fluff.
It’s because there are tons of laws and regulations regarding minors in school, and administration tends to be homegrown (initial expertise in teaching) rather than explicitly developed to navigate the social, political and legal landscape. I’d wager that more than half of those positions are “best practice” staffing decisions in response to this landscape. A handful might also be due to expressed needs and wants of parents. Likely wasteful overall, but students, teachers and families would likely feel the impact and not be satisfied if any positions were axed.
> Which of those roles specifically would you say are fluff?
Food-services manager (it's all oursourced to Aramark), data-processing specialist, print-center technician, senior clerical assistant, one of registrar or attendance, two of site maintenance, one of the network specialists (probably both–one across the district is plenty), and probably at least one of the counselors and the separate social science & athletics person, who should just be one of the physical education teachers. That's about ten people, or a million dollars–minimum–in annual savings.
As a full-time position? Aramark literally ran the lunch counters. I could see it being a district-level position, though it would be better positioned as a general procurement role.
> Data-processing specialist and print-center technician both sound like fancy names for secretarial roles
I agree. I was suspicious when I didn't see a secretary for each of the assistant principals listed.
> You're honestly saying schools need fewer counselors in what has been generally regarded as the worst generation for child mental health in years?
I am. Unless the counselors are constantly doing actual therapy I'm deeply sceptical you need that many for a student body of that size. The fact that they're assigned based on the first letter of your last name versus anything remotely thematic or behaviour based seems to emphasise that hypothesis, for me at least.
(When I went to the school, there were bullshit jobs everywhere. One of the counselors didn't deign to meet with students. Her role was "strategic" or some nonsense.)
> One of the counselors didn't deign to meet with students.
Why would she? That'd distract her from the actually important work of fabricating the reports that make her looking amazingly competent.
My mom is a retired teacher and her main complaint during the last 10-15 years of work was that with all the bullshit paperwork they're required to fill, the teachers literally don't have the time to just plain interact with the students. You want to make an odd, unscheduled extracurricular event? Waste a small pile of paper before organizing it, arguing for how amazing it will be for the students' education, and the an even larger pile of paper afterwards, bluntly telling just how amazing it all worked out and checked some tick boxes the upper management cares about.
This is not creating widgets or lines of code, not creating a product for consumption, this is fostering the development of inquisitive minds, hopefully encouraging them to become critical thinkers and ultimately the next generation of leaders who will push the bounds of human knowledge further than ever before.
Why would better tools be expected to do enable teachers to do that for more students at a time?
There is a lot of research out there showing worse educational outcomes as class sizes increase. This is one of the areas where wealth disparities in education manifest; rich areas tend to have smaller class sizes, and historically the very rich would pay for private tutors for their kids, whereas poor kids are stuck with bigger class sizes, less individual attention from educators, and typically average worse educational outcomes.
>This is not creating widgets or lines of code, not creating a product for consumption, this is fostering the development of inquisitive minds, hopefully encouraging them to become critical thinkers and ultimately the next generation of leaders who will push the bounds of human knowledge further than ever before.
There's plenty of drudge work teachers do that's not "fostering the development of inquisitive minds". Grading papers, preparing lesson plans, etc. I don't see why not at least some of that can be offloaded to AI.
> Why would better tools be expected to do enable teachers to do that for more students at a time?
Khan Academy showed that one great teacher distributed to millions does that pretty well. It doesn't make sense for every teacher in the country (the worst and the best) to create their own syllabus and teach the same thing over and over again.
Sure, let's have 100 child classes which are hell on earth for everybody involved, starting with the little kids who will literally be scarred for life from it.
Teacher costs should be going up as much as we can afford, to keep reducing class sizes as a fundamental part of quality education.
I agree that admin is ripe for efficiency gains. A local school district cut dozens of teaching roles, not even one person from their extremely bloated central administration. It's also out of touch with the schools with no campus visits, and serves mainly as a hindrance to any sort of actual work going on inside the individual schools. It's a horrible caricature of bureaucracy.
> Only if you assume if per-teacher productivity can't increase.
It can't.
The only axis upon which teacher "productivity" could increase is by increasing the size of their classes.
Every study and every practical example of doing that ever done shows that it negatively impacts student outcomes.
Not because the teacher is failing to be whatever it is you imagine "more productive" to be but because there is a minimum amount of attention needed per student for them to not fall through the cracks and one person's attention is not scalable.
> only axis upon which teacher "productivity" could increase is by increasing the size of their classes
And hours in class. Or productivity of time in class. I'm not saying the former is desirable or latter feasible. But the education "production function" has three inputs.
Oh, it definitely can, in a way very similar to the way you can dramatically increase doctor's success rates by being selective about who you treat.
Specifically: take the most disruptive students and eat them. (Be stealthy about it, the point is not fear of punishment.) The productivity difference between a classroom that spends 90% of its time on instruction vs 90% of its time on classroom management is massive.
That's why you have to be careful about applying business notions like "productivity" to governmental duties like education and mail and highways. (I dearly wanted to include healthcare or at least hospitals in the list, but I live in the US.) Businesses can and should be selective and take higher risks. For governmental tasks, productivity isn't even well-defined. If you're failing (or eating) 20% of your students but the other 80% are doing amazingly well, is that better or worse than 99% of everyone doing just okay? How about if everyone's test scores go up and practical ability goes to shit? (This is not a hypothetical, not where the kids have figured out how to use ChatGPT even for the tests. Which is a lot of places.)
Teaching is nowhere near Pareto optimal right now, so I'm not arguing in favor of the status quo. I'm just saying you have to be very, very careful when pushing for "productivity".
You could increase per teacher productivity by running 12 months of school per year, but you would increase costs; and in some parts of California, you would need to rebuild schools with air conditioning to hold classes effectively in the summer.
Covid showed distance learning doesn't work for most kids. So you can't eliminate real estate costs or hire educators in low cost areas. Computerized education doesn't seem to work, either.
>You could increase per teacher productivity by running 12 months of school per year
Productivity is output divided by some input, either labor or money. Working for longer isn't going to magically increase productivity.
>Covid showed distance learning doesn't work for most kids. So you can't eliminate real estate costs or hire educators in low cost areas. Computerized education doesn't seem to work, either.
Right, I don't have a specific solution for increasing teacher productivity, but it's not obvious that it's a law of economics that it can't increase. People thought lawyers and doctors couldn't be automated away, then came chatgpt.
> People thought lawyers and doctors couldn't be automated away, then came chatgpt.
Form contracts and will generators and what not was automation for lawyers. Plenty of enter symptoms to get a diagnosis stuff out there for doctors; or the more paletable, enter symptoms for charting, get a suggestion and enter medicines and get alerts about interactions.
in California there are not more students.. all tiers of schools show falling enrollments, year after year. Except community colleges, where they have discovered that more than 15% of all students are ghost enrolled.
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California K-12 public school enrollment fell by 74,961 students (a 1.3% decline) for the 2025-26 school year, marking the largest drop since the pandemic. This loss was significantly higher than the state’s Department of Finance projection of only 10,000 students.
The decline is driven by lower birth rates and a reduction in immigration, with the latter exacerbated by families fearing enforcement actions. Los Angeles County accounted for nearly half of the state's total loss, losing 32,953 students, largely due to a decrease in newcomer students within the LAUSD.
Private schools saw a steeper drop of 6.6%, while homeschooling declined by 3.7%.
The enrollment drop is causing budget deficits, leading to staff layoffs, program cuts, and potential school closures.
Hispanic students experienced the largest numeric loss (48,064), while white students saw the largest percentage decline (2.68%).
English learner enrollment fell by 8.2%, partly due to reclassification and partly due to out-migration.
From glancing at the numbers it looks pretty similar, but there's been a huge drop in births in California in the last 10-20 years so it's probably the last few years where that will be true.
Peak birth year was 1990 after booming through the 80s, births started falling off a cliff after 2008 and last year there were about the same number of births as in 1980 despite the population increasing by 80%.
It shouldn't be surprising when you see what the educational technology money is actually spent on. Ive seen like a dozen "smart boards" purchased by my schools from the 00's and never once seen one used. Or how about the completely dog shit computer testing software that fails one-two word answers based on random capitalization or punctuation with no indication on what they expect. Each thing sold as the solution to all the past problems, but introducing more problems itself without actually solving any old ones.
